Haas expect “massive boost from very first race” with improved VF-25

Haas have high hopes for the gains they’ve made with their new car for the 2025 Formula 1 season.

“Our focus was the points of weakness identified in the VF-24,” he explained. “With the help of the performance team, we tried to work on the whole car as a package to be able to solve the issue.

“An indication of this is that we worked a lot on the rear of the car, and particularly the rear wing. I think that we’ve done a really good job on this for 2025.

“We believe the package we’ve designed is a really good one in terms of development. Obviously, we must check if the delivery is what we expect. If we’re able to see on track what we think we’re discovering in the wind tunnel, I think that we can have a massive boost from the very first race.”

Haas moved up three places to seventh in the championship last year, though their form fluctuated noticeably from track to track. Paganelli believes their new car should perform more consistently.

“We’ve tried to design a car that can adapt to different races,” he said, “as one of the weaknesses we had last year was not being able to be able to perform at the same level at circuits with different characteristics.

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“I think that we did a good job in trying to close this kind of gap as well as providing a configuration that is better in hotter races. We know at the beginning of the season we have some hot races, so we should be able to compete.”

Paganelli said the team’s mood is upbeat following the progress they made in the last 12 months since Ayao Komatsu arrived as team principal.

“Last year we grew a lot in terms of design resource and we also gained a lot of confidence that we can definitely do better. The mood in the design office today is absolutely positive, we can feel the energy here. Last season we were able to demonstrate to ourselves and the rest of the grid that we can do a very good job.

“We consider 2024 a success because we came into this season being last in the championship. It was really difficult to be able to deliver something positive with the same resource, but by changing the organisational structure we unlocked the potential of team members, and that was really satisfying.”

The team ran its VF-25 for the first time last weekend at Silverstone, with its new driver Esteban Ocon at the wheel. His team mate, rookie Oliver Bearman, is due to sample the new car for the first time on Monday at the Bahrain International Circuit ahead of next week’s pre-season test.

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